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Intel + Compiz + Xv

10-24-2007, 09:47 AM

How about running compiz and watching movies at the same time?
We all've seen or experienced the cool videos of trasparent cube with live-running videos composed in, using nvidia.
Will it ever be possible with intel?

The difference is that EXA support is now stable and the driver defaults to using it. Using EXA acceleration method allows Xv and compiz to work together fine.

EXA worked so-so for 2.1.xx releases of the drivers, but had performance and stability issues in my experiance. But now everything seems kosher.

I am using Debian unstable, for the record. I don't know the avialability of the driver on other distributions.

Besides that other improvements include things like dynamic texture memory support (so that the drivers can allocate memory on the fly for video games) and a mild performance boost for 3D when combined with the latest Mesa stuff (looking at 10-20% using a seat of the pants estimate)

Unfortunately 3D still suffers from the same problem as Xv using XAA. I don't know a fix for that yet, but I may be missing something. That's not so bad since for games you'll want to disable compiz temporarially for best performance.

Comment

Looks like the ultimate end point for Linux driver development would be invovling Glucose running on top of a Gallium3D-based driver.

Currently you have Mesa-based DRI drivers doing acceleration for OpenGL graphics. Then you have a seperate Intel driver that provides either XAA or EXA rendering methods. So this is effectively 3 different rendering methods using two seperate drivers running at the same time on the same card.

Glucose, if I am right, provides a 2-D rendering method based on OpenGL and it avoids a lot of replication.

Gallium3D is a single driver, replacing DRI, that can handle multiple forms of rendering (OpenGL, OpenVR, DirectX, Glucose, etc)

So ultimately this is the way to go.. one driver, multiple rendering methods. More suited for modern architecture then the older DRI method.

EXA is a sort of stop-gap.. it allows easy way to get 2-D acceleration compared to the XAA stuff which is mostly old and busted. If we had to wait for all the Gallium3D stuff to get this working it'd be another year at least, maybe two.

Comment

Thanks. Now I can enjoy the benefits of EXA while using Compiz on my laptop.

But there's a little tearing-effect in the middle of each window. In Compiz I set the refresh-rate to 60hz, activated Vsync and Xv-videos slow my cursor-response-time down. Nothing one can do about that, huh?